Silent poetry: deafness, sign, and visual culture in modern France

Abstract

This text explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the philosophes to the introduction of the sound motion picture. It shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien regime metaphor of painting as poetry into a 19th-century school of over 100 deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as savages, excluded and ignored by the hearing. This book is concerned with the process and history of that marginalization, the constitution of a centre from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse. Based on archival and pictorial research, the text's intertextual analysis of what it terms the silent screen of deafness produces an alternative history of 19th-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism and art history, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine, and should also interest a general audience concerned with the relationship of the deaf and the larger society.